I'm glad Yahtzee understands how horror works. Everyone seems to get it wrong nowadays. It's not about showing the biggest scariest monster up close and threateningly personal. It's about implying danger and letting the viewer's mind run wild with thoughts of what could be lurking around the corner. Nothing is scarier than what your imagination can conjure up.

The Heavy Rain finger chopping scene comparison was a good point. It actually felt difficult for me to do it.

DrTrent:I'm glad Yahtzee understands how horror works. Everyone seems to get it wrong nowadays. It's not about showing the biggest scariest monster up close and threateningly personal. It's about implying danger and letting the viewer's mind run wild with thoughts of what could be lurking around the corner. Nothing is scarier than what your imagination can conjure up.

Yeah, I felt more frightened with Demon's Souls because of the tension and sense of vulnerability than with Dead Space. There is no music except in boss fights. Even in a well lit room when there are no enemies you can always imagine a tough guy coming around the corner. They don't even hide, it's like they feel they are tough enough to kill you in a couple hits. Which they usually do.

That analogy to the child wanting attention was one of the best and the funniest. "Are you scared yet, what if all the skin rolled off my face, are you scared yet. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa...." LOL. That's why I found Dead Space one to be an action game and not a horror game.

samaugsch:One thing that bothered me was that supposedly, the easiest way to dispatch most necromorphs is to dismember their limbs, providing they have any. Yet, impaling them with a sharp object seems to be just as effective. Wtf?

Dawkter:Dead Space 2 is more of a repetitive thriller than a horror game. A few hours in the game you get used to Necromorph's odd appearances and they just startle you. It's just as scary as Half-Life 2.

TBH the first few hours are the most tedious and are almost rail shooter like. After about level 5 it either got a lot better or had degraded my cognitive processes enough to enjoy it a lot more ...

Perhaps the latter, since I found the initial stages more enjoyable the second time around. But then maybe it's because I rushed through them knowing nothing interesting was going to happen, rather than wandering round forlornly thinking, "where's the fun?".

Verkula:Theres no shitty MP in DS2. Only an extra MP you can try after bored of the single.

Not everything is trying to be the next "best MP shooter" you know.

I'm well aware of that, but then why use the resources to include it?I guess most people will do as I did; play 1 round as both humans and necromorphs, then toss it aside. They could've used those resources to improve the single player (better boss fight perhaps?).

Honestly, I feel that everybody makes the mistake of viewing this game as a horror game, including the designers/developers, instead of a human drama with a survival horror background. The best part of the game was the beginning when there were other people experiencing the shit going down. Watching the huge crowd of people runing and being massacred by a horde of nercromorphs early on actually hit a bit of a note for me. I thought that instead of sticking Issac in a variety of dull rooms with a variety of people with claws for tits, they would focus on the panic and hysteria of the outbreak, with the crawling through dull rooms still there, but intermixed with dealing with a panicked crowd of survivors. I realize that it would be hard to do, but they could have at least given it a bit of a try. For example, there could have been a bit early on where Issac has to race through a crowd of people moving in the opposite direction in order to seal off a large doorway which necromorphs are swarming through in order to try to turn the crowd into a collection of decapitated bits. That scene would both be interesting from a gameplay perspective, a storytelling perspective, and it would also be pretty moving, especially if you added something like Issac being stuck on the other side of the blast door. This isn't the most well developed idea, but I feel that if Visceral tried to incoporate it on some shape or form, it probably would have worked.

I also feel that how they choose to represent Issac's dementia early in the game was somewhat of a mistake. For example, there is one part where you are going under a walkway to reach the tram, and about halfway under the screen goes all red and blurry. When you get to the tram you see Nicole, his girlfriend, in her evil bloody corpse version, and then she vanishes. I feel a more effective way of doing that would be to merely have Nicole be there, for us to unexpectedly stumble upon, and the red blurriness to only appear when she disappears. It would have made it less expected, and made it harder to determine when Issac is suffering from a delusion or not.

That being said, I still think that Dead Space 2 was a well designed game, and although they made a few mistakes, I feel that it is a definite improvement over the first. The characters are better developed and the gameplay is more balanced (the plasma rifle is no longer useless, and the plasma cutter is no longer strictly better than everything else). When judged by its own merits, the game is very good, not great, but definitely worth the money. It also stands up on its single player alone, which is more than the mass-produced machine of call of duty can say. Yet at the same time I'm disapointed, which seems to be a recurring theme recently (before dead space, the last new game I purchased was Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which while good on its own, was very weak compared to its predecessors. If Golden Suns 1 and 2 were like Final Fantasy 6 & 7, Dark Dawn was at about the level of 5 and 8). I feel that if Visceral had made different design choices, Dead Space 2 could easily have become one of the new pillars of the "games as art" argument, as it had so much potential.

However, ultimately, I look forward to seeing Dead Space 3, because it seems that if Visceral continues to improve, they will eventually be able to realize the potential of the series. Its the same reason I keep on buying the Fable games, because I'm convinced that Peter will eventually get things right, and that by about Fable 7 or Dead Space 9, they will be able to produce something so perfect that lesser designers begin trying to rip it off so rapidly that they develop faster than light travel.

samaugsch:One thing that bothered me was that supposedly, the easiest way to dispatch most necromorphs is to dismember their limbs, providing they have any. Yet, impaling them with a sharp object seems to be just as effective. Wtf?

Verkula:Theres no shitty MP in DS2. Only an extra MP you can try after bored of the single.

Not everything is trying to be the next "best MP shooter" you know.

I'm well aware of that, but then why use the resources to include it?I guess most people will do as I did; play 1 round as both humans and necromorphs, then toss it aside. They could've used those resources to improve the single player (better boss fight perhaps?).

Because its a nice idea? I liked the Beta, and now that i tried it in the full game, i like it here too. Its fun to play, and actually needs teamwork.Im guessing this was just a little test, to see if enough people like it to expand the online mode for DS3. Theres even going to be an little event tomorrow to play with the developers, and unlock some more suits.Also no, as far as i know a different team made the multiplayer. I would have also liked some more boss fights(or rather A boss fight somewhere), but as it is right now, i doubt the single player mode suffered in any way, because of the MP.

regalphantom:Honestly, I feel that everybody makes the mistake of viewing this game as a horror game, including the designers/developers, instead of a human drama with a survival horror background. The best part of the game was the beginning when there were other people experiencing the shit going down. Watching the huge crowd of people runing and being massacred by a horde of nercromorphs early on actually hit a bit of a note for me. I thought that instead of sticking Issac in a variety of dull rooms with a variety of people with claws for tits, they would focus on the panic and hysteria of the outbreak, with the crawling through dull rooms still there, but intermixed with dealing with a panicked crowd of survivors. I realize that it would be hard to do, but they could have at least given it a bit of a try. For example, there could have been a bit early on where Issac has to race through a crowd of people moving in the opposite direction in order to seal off a large doorway which necromorphs are swarming through in order to try to turn the crowd into a collection of decapitated bits. That scene would both be interesting from a gameplay perspective, a storytelling perspective, and it would also be pretty moving, especially if you added something like Issac being stuck on the other side of the blast door. This isn't the most well developed idea, but I feel that if Visceral tried to incoporate it on some shape or form, it probably would have worked.

I also feel that how they choose to represent Issac's dementia early in the game was somewhat of a mistake. For example, there is one part where you are going under a walkway to reach the tram, and about halfway under the screen goes all red and blurry. When you get to the tram you see Nicole, his girlfriend, in her evil bloody corpse version, and then she vanishes. I feel a more effective way of doing that would be to merely have Nicole be there, for us to unexpectedly stumble upon, and the red blurriness to only appear when she disappears. It would have made it less expected, and made it harder to determine when Issac is suffering from a delusion or not.

That being said, I still think that Dead Space 2 was a well designed game, and although they made a few mistakes, I feel that it is a definite improvement over the first. The characters are better developed and the gameplay is more balanced (the plasma rifle is no longer useless, and the plasma cutter is no longer strictly better than everything else). When judged by its own merits, the game is very good, not great, but definitely worth the money. It also stands up on its single player alone, which is more than the mass-produced machine of call of duty can say. Yet at the same time I'm disapointed, which seems to be a recurring theme recently (before dead space, the last new game I purchased was Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which while good on its own, was very weak compared to its predecessors. If Golden Suns 1 and 2 were like Final Fantasy 6 & 7, Dark Dawn was at about the level of 5 and 8). I feel that if Visceral had made different design choices, Dead Space 2 could easily have become one of the new pillars of the "games as art" argument, as it had so much potential.

However, ultimately, I look forward to seeing Dead Space 3, because it seems that if Visceral continues to improve, they will eventually be able to realize the potential of the series. Its the same reason I keep on buying the Fable games, because I'm convinced that Peter will eventually get things right, and that by about Fable 7 or Dead Space 9, they will be able to produce something so perfect that lesser designers begin trying to rip it off so rapidly that they develop faster than light travel.

Hmmm, well I think one of the issues is that this would be a horror game to everyone except for the audience it was directed at. See, people who like horror and seek it out tend to become rather jaded, and hard to get a reaction from. The industry by and large is not willing to push far enough to cater to the demographic they are trying to target, so most attempts wind up falling kind of flat like happened here from the reactions I'm getting. I think the issue is not so much the action components ruining things, so much as that despite a decent base of lore it's not really doing much that we haven't seen before, nor is it doing it in a way that is especially shocking or memorable.

Perhaps we'll see a renaissance in horror gaming, but honestly I think that won't come until they are willing to push the "M" rating to the absolute limit, and the gaming industry starts to thrive on and seek contreversy instead of running away from it as much as I see right now. It plays the game of pretending to thrive on contreversy, but really I've seen more serious issues coming from ad campaigns like "moms hates this game" (or whatever it was) or the Dante's Inferno stuff.

-

On another note, has anyone heard much about Yahtzee's "Fun Space Game: The Game"? I'm wondering if when he finishes it his next project will be to try and similarly show the adult games industry how it's done by making a game set in "The Land Of Chocolate Lesbians", since Space is apparently only the second best setting, and you know, as a quality game developer he probably wants to use the absolute best to show off it's merits. Maybe if it catches on we'll see a whole new game genere replacing "Sword and Sorcery" as the mainstay and we'll see like Chocolate Lesbian MMOs and stuff. Yahtzee runs a bar too, and a hint of sleaze tends to bring in the crowds, probably an easy way to recruit actresses and find amateur talent for later digitization and/or artistic inspiration.

All kidding/dreaming aside though, I missed it if he finished his Space Game somehow since I don't remember him mentioning it in his videos for a while.

I really loved this game, and the first. I start most horror games on the hardest difficulty so I am genuinley scared when I have to go up against big room fulls of enemies with limited health and ammo.

FORCE GUN FORCE GUN FORCE GUN STOMP!

but I think this game could be improved in three ways.

1. MAKE ATTACKS DAMAGE ALL THE TIME... I HATE it everytime I use my savoured ammo on an enemy and it does nothing because he's halfway through an animation...

2. Let us destroy the gravity in almost any room. that would be really cool.

3. I was hoping when they said they were making a sequel that there would be some sort of customisation to the look of Isaac's weapons, like a spiked shield on the end of the line gun or something, improvised weaponry would be awesome (especially seeing as you're playing as an engineer)